TOS Crew Review: Moving Beyond the Page Curriculum

We recently had the chance to review two curriculum packages from Moving Beyond the Page; a Language Arts Package: American Heroes and a Science Package: The Land 

Moving Beyond the Page is a comprehensive homeschool curriculum that covers science, social studies, and language arts.  It is set up kind of like a unit studies curriculum and you get to pick and choose your lessons.  They have lessons for ages 4-14 and many of them can be used for several students at once.  

I love finding curriculum packages that I can use for both my 1st grader and my 4th grader with just moderate tweaking.  They enjoy working on science and social studies projects together and we were very excited to get to try this particular curriculum because it focuses on "moving beyond the page."  This curriculum supports visual, kinesthetic and auditory learning.  Each unit is full of hands-on projects and activities that keep kiddos engaged, focused and having fun while learning.  In our experience, this type of learning tends to stick with the kiddos a lot longer than textbook learning does.Lessons include writing activities, oral activities, crafts and other hands-on projects.  The kiddos are encouraged to explore, imagine and create and they love it!

You can buy an entire year's curriculum or just the units that fit best with your existing curriculum and they are available as both online guides and physical guides.  The online guides are easy to follow and laid out very logically.  It's really easy to track your progress.  There are some printable student pages, but the lessons are online.  Any physical components come with the package deal as well.  For example, we did the Language Arts Package: American Heroes unit with the online guide and we were sent the book 50 American Heroes Every Kid Should Meet that corresponded with the online lessons.  For the Science Package: The Land, we were sent the physical package which included a physical workbook and the book Maps and Mapping.  Each lesson lists what is included in the package so you can decide if that works better for you.  If you already have the litereature book the unit is based on, it may make more sense to just buy the physical guide or online version.  

On to the specific packages we reviewed:

The science package was about The Land.  It covers lessons about a variety of different types of maps, the parts of a map, and how to use maps.

The kiddos learned about resources found in the environment and how they are used and conserved. We also learned about farming in the U.S.  These lessons were reinforced with fun activities including recipes:

Drawing/Coloring pages:

and fun Graphic Organizers:

The accompanying book about mapping is full of colorful pages and fun experiments and crafts:

This unit can be used independently, but it is designed to be used concurrently with the literature unit, Sarah, Plain and Tall.  We did it as a stand alone unit and it was a smashing success!

The next package was a Social Studies/Language Arts unit on American Heroes:

This unit focused on learning about what makes a person a hero and learning about notable American heroes.  

The accompanying book was full of great information and anecdotes about each hero and the kiddos enjoyed the stories.  I read them aloud so that both kiddos could benefit from them.  The lesson is for ages 7-9 and the reading level was a bit over 5 year old D's head:)  We learned a lot from this unit and the lessons were a lot of fun.  There were quite few writing assignments, but they were interesting enough to keep the kiddos engaged.

This unit can be used independently but is designed to be used concurrently with the science and social studies, People Change the World.  Again, we used it as a stand alone unit and it was great!

Overall, we really enjoyed our experience with Moving Beyond the Page!

The Science Package: The Land physical package can be purchased for $24.98.

The Language Arts Package: American Heroes Online version can be purchased for $24.98.

Follow Moving Beyond the Page via Facebook – www.facebook.com/movingbeyondthepage